Health Article - Using Seasonal Whole Foods To Beat the Heat
In Ayurveda seasonal eating is key to maintaining balanced health. Spring is the time of year the earth and our bodies retain more water. This manifests as spring allergies and colds that are common during this time of year. (Think of that nagging nasal and throat congestion that greets you in the morning and keeps coming back.) If we did not clear this congestion by eating the mucus-melting leafy greens, berries, and fruits of spring, we often enter summer carrying much of spring’s sputum with us. This mucus and phlegm generally accumulate in the gut and sinuses.
Cherries provide another example of how nature shows up to support a healthy transition between seasons. Cherries signal that spring is over and summer is here. Their presence confirms that this is the last chance to capture the benefits of a spring detox. With the end of each season nature provides fruits and vegies to prep different bodily tissues and organs, such as the skin, colon, and liver, for cleansing. All berries, like cherry, straw, black and blueberries are major lymph and adipose tissue cleansers. Summer calls for foods that are higher in healthy carbohydrates to provide energy for the long hot days of summer. If you eat enough fruits like pomegranates, peaches, nectarines, apples, watermelon, etc. they will hydrate the body and stimulate the body’s natural detox and dilate its heat-removing channels.
Summer is when we begin to store heat energy in the body. The long days of activity with less rest build fire (pitta) in the body, which peaks at the end of the summer. Nature’s super cooling foods are harvested at the end of summer to move the maximum heat out of the body. Nature provides an abundance of naturally cooling and liver alkalizing foods. Falling leaves are evidence of nature’s response to the accumulation of heat that has built up in plants and trees by the end of the season. The autumn leaves actually detox the trees and prep them to go dormant during the winter. If we allow summer’s heat to accumulate unchecked by cooling seasonal foods, this spring accumulation of mucus can literally bake onto the intestinal and respiratory mucosa, causing further irritation and degradation of the good microbes in our gut microbiome.
Know that the human digestive fire (agni) is naturally weaker in the summer, and thus we typically have a harder time digesting heavy, fatty and rich foods during this time. Nature is cooking all the fruits and veggies on the vine all summer long, so from nature’s perspective, the need to generate an abundance of digestive acid to cook foods that are already pre-cooked by the sun is redundant. And wherever the body can conserve energy, it automatically will. This reduced digestive fire during summer has been one of our survival techniques for millions of years. As the earth heated up, being able to survive, and endure the ongoing hunt for food (prey), required an incredible ability to handle heat, and this is just one of our heat-reducing mechanisms. So be sure to think twice this summer before taking that 2nd or 3rd helping of barbecued ribs, breads, or macaroni & cheese as these are winter foods that challenge the digestive system.
